Look Up

After a weekend spent attending the funeral of a friend who was overwhelmingly loved, I have been waking earlier than usual and sitting at the kitchen table in the pre-day dim light. Waiting for my thoughts to settle.

I saw countless friends from near and far at the services, but what surprised me were the unplanned encounters in the surrounding area with friends I did not expect to see. My cousin on the campus of Goshen College. A Harrisonburg friend at the Mennonite Mission Network offices, meeting with the committee for the new hymnal. A college friend at Maple City Market. I had almost forgotten what it was like to be in the midst of a deeply intersectional community, where my identity is bigger.

As for the service, it was beautiful and it was good and it was awful. As witnesses, we staggered under the weight of truths from the mouths of the most brokenhearted. It felt wrong to even expect that the family and close friends would deliver wisdom, inspiration, beauty, but that is what they did. They bore testimony to a life well lived. And yet nothing about it felt okay. Nothing came close to being okay.

It called to mind -- albeit painfully -- the truth that an easy life is not granted in accordance with how much any of us deserves one.

I understood in a new way that funerals are not for the dead. Funerals are for the living. For we did not grieve for her, not really; we grieved for ourselves, being without her. She has escaped her body, escaped all pain, forever. She is shrouded in more radiance and joy than any of us can understand. And yet we miss her. Oh, we miss her. We miss her with the collective heaviness of five hundred souls who gather in a church, just to listen and to cry and to bear witness to a tragedy we will never understand, but one that was ordained from the beginning.

Look up.

Love what God has created.

This is what we know.